‘Where Should I let Go?’

Lindsay Liang is a New York–based interdisciplinary artist and printmaker whose work explores memory, spatial distortion, and the residue of perception. She fuses analog techniques with digital processes, often drawing inspiration from neuroscience, literature, and fragments of place.

Where Should I let Go?

Shady black with cyber yellow stripes, feather-soft petals of flight, drizzling stars of silence in the longitudinal pairs, a butterfly grasped its hindwings securely with a sort of belief, “Maybe one day, I can let go.”

I kept watching it fly away, from worry, from insecurity, humming a familiar melody. I came across the island of memories within a moment, standing by my window, while the world outside was busy witnessing the start of a love story; as the cloud gently took his sun in his embrace, healed the scars with silent prayers, confided his reasons and hid its timidity in his warm confession. 

Your emotions became too heavy, and you became too tired to carry them anymore. A cascade of water flows celestially in the softest way from the waterfall only to get scattered on unyielding terrain. In a way, I followed the same path. 

Yet one day, you told me to let go. But where should I let go?

In the wounds of my pitch-black night? 

In the smile that pierced through my outrage? 

In the silence of my chaotic emotions? 

In the tear of my sizzling waves? 

Where? 

Little snowflakes brushed in the soft whispers of a honeydew green leaf, welcoming the winter. The butterfly couldn’t appear as the enchantress goddess in the stillness of air.

Yet I didn’t find where. Where should I let go? 

Rumaisa Reza is a high school student from Bangladesh who loves to explore emotions through writing and reading.